Thoughts on Benazir Bhutto, Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan and Western democracy

It’s the Friday after Christmas and before the New Year and I’m still under the weather. I haven’t had a simple cold that knock me out so badly in years. It’s not so much the symptoms as it is pure fatigue and lack of focus. Sleep is difficult though because as soon as I lie down, I try to cough up a lung. And now, I’m stressing out about the work I should be getting done at the office. Anyway, none of that is my topic for today.

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As probably most of you know, Pakistani political leader Benazir Bhutto was slain/died yesterday. No one seems to know what happened and “the word” keeps changing. Currently CNN and the BBC are reporting that the Pakistani government (always a reliable source) says that she died from hitting her head on her car as she tried to duck back into it when shots were fired. Truth is reputedly stranger than fiction and for her to die from hitting her head on her car when people were shooting at her and blowing up next to her would definitely qualify for that. If true, I’m not even sure that it would qualify as an assassination; more like death by accident while avoiding assassination. No matter what, it seems obvious to me that she would still be alive if she had not stuck her head out the moonroof of her SUV. Why would she do that when she knew there were a lot of people who wanted to assassinate her? How can her security detail possibly protect her (from herself) when she insisted on doing something like that? But I digress.

Pakistan is in chaos according to the news with riots, funerals, conspiracy theories, mud slinging, and so forth. Musharraf is, of course, being looked at with suspicion, but he’d be an idiot if he did this precisely because he’s the first one a lot of people would blame. But then again, if he knew that people would think he was too smart to have done something this stupid… and now we look like the iocane powder scene from The Princess Bride. Honestly, I don’t know what to think about all of this. I don’t know these people, their country, their politics, or anything else about the situation aside from what’s contained in the Western press, a suspect source. (For example, consider the amount of sheer press time the Bhutto assassination is getting compared to the press time that the several assassinated pro-West Lebanese politicians got.) And of course, we hear the devil terms Al-Queda and Taliban being bantered about by the various talking heads. We may never know.

I don’t know what the long term effect of yesterday’s assassination will be for U.S./Western interests, good or bad. I doubt anyone else does either. Bhutto was always described by our media as “pro-West” but I’m not sure such a convenient label/sound byte can be easily applied to such a complicated woman. Certainly it is a gross oversimplification. Besides, how often have those “friendly” foreign politicians that we supported become the next decade’s problem children? Didn’t we support Saddam back in the 80’s when we were mad at Iran? Which brings me to Musharraf, our previous fair-haired boy in Pakistan.

For several months now I’ve marveled at the hypocrisy coming out of Washington regarding U.S. aims. If we are to be believed our policy (divine mission?) is to spread freedom and democracy to the world. Mind you no one has made a case that these two things must necessarily go together or that they necessarily constitute what is best for the peoples we are trying to give them to or that giving other people these things is in our own best interest. As a democratic nation, we simply ASSUME these things. Richard M. Weaver would call these “god terms.” Weaver’s “god term” was a word, vague in its meaning or vaguely used, but so laden with positive emotional connotation that its very use imbued the message with a strong positive resonance. (A devil term was the mirror opposite of a god term.) But I digress again.

My question is this: In a country where the majority of populace detests all things Western with, shall we say, a radical religious fundamentalism supports active anti-Western (terrorist) activities, would we prefer a strong, totalitarian, non-democratic, pro-Western leader or would we prefer the government that the majority of such a populace would elect? We ASSUME that any democracy is necessarily going to be 1) Pro-West; 2) Tolerant; 3) Non-extremist; 4) conscious of “human rights” (another Weaverian god term); and good for our interests. Maybe that’s where freedom comes in. We want to foster not just any democracy, but only a free democracy by which we mean “agrees with our values.” Here ya go, freedom as long as it is freedom done our way. It’s almost Platonic: If you aren’t doing it our way, you aren’t doing it right, and, if you don’t agree that just means you don’t understand yet.

What if the best thing for our national interest is for Country X to be ruled by a dictator and not a democracy. Even if we accept, for the sake of argument only, that a democracy is de facto the best thing for the populace of Country X; that doesn’t mean that it will be the best thing for our citizens. The Miltonian counter argument here is, of course, that any democratic nation will inevitably come to share the same value as any other democratic nation and thus they become aligned. Ergo, fostering democracy elsewhere serves our national long term best interest. I’m just not sure I buy it, not in a world of ideological extremism.

Now, Pervez Musharraf is not exactly an ideal democratic leader, but he’s not the juntas of Burma either. We keep pushing him to do one thing and then we make it more difficult for him by insisting he worry about something else. We sit over here, half a globe away from his country and, from the comfort of our back seat, try to tell him how to run his country without ever having walked a mile in the man’s moccasins. He must get really frustrated dealing with our arrogant democracy.

So, is Musharraf a bad guy? I don’t honestly know, but he’s a damn sight better than some other guys. Was Bhutto the last best hope for Western democracy in Pakistan? Maybe or maybe not. Would Bhutto have been a better friend to us than Musharraf? We’ll never know. Is the assassination of Bhutto a catastrophe for Western hopes in Pakistan? Time will tell.